Thursday, January 23, 2014

Dana's photo, and Dana's hand over a very nice seam of serpentine at the Patrick Creek site. When you walk up to this outcrop, you may spot some small chips on the ground, but as a rule, you won't see anything like this on the surface. It takes some prying and digging to find the really pretty samples. Since the whole cliff is composed of crushed, broken rock, that prying and digging is quite easy, but requires a certain amount of caution: you don't want to bring a ton of it down on yourself. Pay attention to what is supporting what. As you pull a slab loose, watch to see what else is moving. Keep to one side or the other of your work area, rather than directly below it. I've never felt threatened or endangered at this site, in the sense of immediate peril, but danger is certainly present. Caution and common sense seem to be good ways to avoid the threats that are present.

(Update 6:30 PM: Problem described in this paragraph has been fixed. I think.) I noticed yesterday that all the links to last year's Geo 365 posts (though not this year's Geo 730 links) in the Geo 730 Index are, shall we say, messed up. This isn't a big problem, and I've already tested a method to fix it relatively quickly and easily. However, actually fixing it for once and for all will take some time, and will involve moving massive amounts of data back and forth, as well as making at least one or two precautionary back-ups so I don't accidentally lose many weeks' worth of work. In the meantime, here's a work-around. Taking as an example the very first link in the list, here's the URL that your browser will attempt to open if you click on it: "https://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9Chttp://outsidetheinterzone.blogspot.com/2013/01/geo-365-jan-21-day-21-reflections.html" Select and delete "https://www.blogger.com/%E2%80%9C," and that will leave you with the correct URL. I'm not sure how this happened, and in relative terms, it won't be too time-consuming to fix. But I want to make sure I'm at peak alertness and minimally distracted before I put in the hour or so of work it'll take to do it right, so it won't be happening right away.